Frankenstein
Victor Frankenstein assembles a living being, is horrified by what he has made, and abandons it. The creature then learns language by watching a family from a hiding place and reads its way into an understanding of its own exclusion. Shelley was nineteen when she began the book.
The famous mistake is calling the creature Frankenstein. The more serious mistake is reading the novel as a warning against science. It is closer to a study of what happens when a creator refuses responsibility, told through three nested narrators who each want the last word.
Public-domain status
First published in 1818. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley died in 1851, so this work has been free to republish there since 1922.
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Keep reading
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